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Jasper explains how bridging IoT and the cloud can transform industries

If we had to identify one company that was sat squarely in the middle of the key talking points at MWC 2016 is would probably be Jasper.

At its simplest level Jasper provides a platform that links the exploding world of IoT devices with the cloud. It deals with all the complicated plumbing concerned with getting data from devices, plugging it into the enterprise IT world and then, ideally, deriving something useful from it. Just as 5G needs to be the technological solution for linking IoT and the cloud, Jasper claims to be one of the business solutions.

Telecoms.com caught up with Robb Henshaw, Jasper’s Senior Director of Corporate Communications, at MWC to get a sense of the kinds of conversations his company was having at the show. “What we’re seeing is people finally demanding to know how IoT is being used in the real world,” said Henshaw.

“Instead of just talking about concepts people are asking ‘what are the real benefits of IoT?’ which is fantastic because we’ve been doing it for a decade. It’s been here for a while and it’s fundamentally transforming the way people do business. At this show last year we announced we had 1,900 enterprises delivering connected services through our platform and in the last year we’ve nearly doubled that.”

Jasper’s self-appointed task is to lubricate the IoT machine and bring its potential to a diverse range of vertical industries. “We call ourselves an IoT services platform,” said Henshaw. “We do not claim to do all things – we are a very specific piece of the overall puzzle. A lot of businesses are moving from products to services and connecting those services with the cloud is a key part of what they’re trying to accomplish.”

A lot of what Jasper has to say is the standard narrative associated with the cloud: a platform that grants its users operational scale and flexibility. At the same time it also partners with a bunch of other cloud providers to offer up complete IoT solutions.

“Big data for the sake of big data accomplishes nothing, the key is how you take that data and transform it into business actions, and that’s a big part of what we enable,” said Henshaw. “We have our own analytics but we also partner with SAP and integrate it into their Hana for IoT platform and many other IT vendors.”

Another partnership, which was announced at the show, is with Gemalto to use eSIMs to create and manage cellular subscriptions on IoT devices remotely. It’s easy to imagine a world in which chip designers like ARM enable eSIM capability in all devices and partnerships like this allow huge IoT projects to be initiated instantaneously. When you combine all this with the sheer corporate potential created by the Cisco acquisition and it’s easy to see Jasper remaining in thick of the IoT mix for years to come.

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